The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, designed and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a multiyear effort to dramatically improve student outcomes by increasing students' access to effective teaching. Participating sites adopted measures of teaching effectiveness that included both a teacher's contribution to growth in student achievement and his or her teaching practices assessed with a structured observation rubric. The measures were to be used to improve staffing actions, identify teaching weaknesses, and overcome them through effectiveness-linked professional development, and employ compensation and career ladders as incentives to retain the most-effective teachers and have them support the growth of other teachers.

Beginning in 2009–2010, three school districts in Florida, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania, and four charter management organizations participated in the Intensive Partnerships initiative. AIR and the RAND Corporation conducted a six-year evaluation of the initiative, documenting the policies and practices each site enacted and their effects on student outcomes. This report describes the findings of this initiative.

Related Projects

Research suggests that effective teaching is the single most important school-based factor influencing student achievement and other student outcomes. And it may be particularly important to low-income and minority students. AIR and RAND are evaluating the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, which aims to improve teaching effectiveness by changing the way districts recruit, retain, and reward teachers.

Related Work

The Intensive Partnership initiative is based on the premise that efforts to improve instruction can benefit from high-quality measures of teaching effectiveness. The present report summarizes the implementation of the initiative from 2010 through 2014, and it should be of interest to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners who want to understand the potential benefits and challenges of adopting new teacher-evaluation systems and related reforms.

A student can’t get a bad school year back. AIR works in a number of areas to develop effective educators. We work to achieve solutions to complex policy and practice problems and to support effective approaches that help teachers thrive.